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In the summer of 2004, aged fifty-seven, I visited the site where my Fleet Air Arm pilot dad had been shot down in 1940 (he “survived” this and another, then five years as a Prisoner of War) in the Norwegian mountains. This was shortly before my second eight year analysis limped to an end, prompting me to remember the age at which I had been sent off to my prep boarding school
(and weekly boarding a year earlier). None of these events was deemed worthy of notice by my three classically trained psychoanalysts (Schaverien, 2011, pp. 146-149). Today I have no doubt that the psycho-somatic-emotional consequences were profound and far-reaching—and I am still exploring their origins and limits.
I spent some seventeen years lying on the couch and in none of that time did I receive anything I could call a “diagnosis”: I was suffering from some apparently unnameable mental dis-ease. It was only after I really decided, post-analysis, that I needed to grapple with the issues implanted by my early boarding, that I was able to steady myself with the self-description “boarding school survivor”, once I had done some group work with the psychotherapist Nick Duffell (2000), in 2006 (Partridge, 2007). Five years later, with a good deal more thought (some of it published) and experience under my belt, imagine my delight when a book titled The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic crossed my horizon. It seemed possible that here was an ambitious attempt to bring out into the open and tackle issues that had dogged my life.
From my perspective, that of an informed trauma sufferer who has recovered quite a lot, this is an extraordinary and path-breaking book. I believe if its insights are taken seriously it could shift the whole therapeutic endeavour on to a different level. Indeed it argues for an integration of psycho- and somatic medicine—for a diagnostic process that crosses the conventional boundar